Vim because it's often bundled with major
Linux distros, is often used to quickly edit text files, but also often used
using only features equivalent to that of Notepad. There is a lot of
functionality in vim, that makes it an indispensable tool for editing, once one
learns how to use it's features better. So this article I'm
writing will hopefully introduce more of the features, that may not be that
familiar to casual users of vim.

There is only split windows and tags at the moment, but I will continue to
add and update it as time permits.

Visually editing diffs with Meld

This is another one of those small but extremely useful tools. It allows
you to visuall edit diffs, and helps when you're doing merges, or eyeballing
problems. It also integrates well with CVS. It's a small py-gtk2 app and
you can learn more about it from the project's homepage.

Was working on some articles on Unified Process and needed some diagrams. Dia is usually fine for most quick UML diagrams, but often you do need other kinds of diagrams. In my case, I needed to draw up a UP disciplines diagram and Dia tools just weren't up to it.

I could never do anything with SodiPodi, and when Inkscape came out with the promise of being easier to use, I tried it out. To my surprise , it was far more intuitive to use, and I could immediately get results I wanted without struggling with the interface. I got the draft diagram I wanted in less than 30 mins using some of the tools for the first time.

Inkscape is evolving rapidly and adding new tools all the time, so if you haven't tried it yet, you should give it a go.

One gripe though is that Dia doesn't import SVG diagrams from Inkscape well which means I lose Dia's UML information when importing Dia svg from Inkscape. I work around this by importing
Inkscape PNG images into Dia for now, but it isn't a satisfactory solution.

I presented a talk for the APIIT Open Source Group Open Day on FOSS on March 25th. It's about how to deal with seemingly complex problems with the use of simple pipes and open source tools available in most open source Unix systems. It's an introductory presentation, and includes some links for those new to development of solutions using Unix tools.

The example case is how to replicate some features of expensive backup software, in one line of shell script.

I didn't see it available at the APIIT website, so I'm making it available here at my website.